📍Ken-Betwa Link: Development or more mindless discrimination?

Linking the Ken and Betwa rivers has become an issue once again. Members of the communities living along these rivers are protesting this in novel ways, lying on simulated funeral pyres in the river waters, starting hunger strikes in a submerged state, or standing in the river with nooses around their necks. “We’ll turn into Durga and Kali,” say the women protesting in chest-deep water. The images are powerful, disturbing, they tell you how much this move has upset those who live along the river and venerate it.

I have travelled through this landscape a few times over the years. In Panna the Ken river flows with a rare serenity, almost stillness. The forests are alive with biodiversity, the terrain rugged yet beautiful, and the river sustains not only wildlife but entire communities of farmers, fishers, forest dwellers and pastoral families. To stand on the banks of the Ken is to understand that rivers are not merely channels of water to be engineered on drawing boards. They are living ecological systems. Which is why the Ken-Betwa river-linking project is deeply troubling.

The project is being promoted as a solution to Bundelkhand’s water crisis, with promises of irrigation and drinking water for drought-prone districts. But beneath the language of development lies a familiar and disturbing reality: Forests will be destroyed, the ecology dented. Thousands of people will lose their homes and ancestral lands, and they will lose their livelihoods. India’s track record on rehabilitating persons displaced by dams and development projects is very poor, in fact rehabilitation in India has rarely been just or complete. Rather than equitable development, this project too, like earlier dam projects, will help some and discriminate against many others.

Independent estimates suggest that more than 22 villages would be displaced, affecting over 7,000 families in Panna and Chattarpur districts, and of these, 20 villages would be completely submerged by the Ken-Betwa project, many of them Adivasi communities dependent on forests and river ecosystems for survival. The Daudhan dam, the cornerstone of the ₹45,000 cr Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP), alone will submerge large areas, including parts of the Panna Tiger Reserve. The irony is painful: a project meant to solve distress in one region will create another geography of suffering elsewhere.

This is a familiar playbook and India has seen it before. When the Bhakra-Nangal dam was built after Independence, it was hailed as one of the “temples of modern India”. It is located on the Sutlej along Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh and Rupnagar in Punjab. Yet behind that grand national narrative lay the 371 submerged villages which took away everything from some 36,000 families — their homes, assets and livelihoods.

Families were promised cultivable land, rehabilitation and a better future. Decades later, many oustees were still fighting legal battles for proper compensation and land rights. Reports have documented how displaced families were pushed onto barren or disputed lands, while many landless workers and labourers were excluded entirely from compensation because they did not possess formal land titles. This pattern repeated itself across India. 

The Hirakud dam in Odisha displaced more than one lakh people and submerged over 300 villages. Many never received proper rehabilitation.

The Pong dam displaced more than 30,000 families from Himachal Pradesh, many of whom were relocated to Rajasthan with promises of fertile agricultural land. Several families reportedly received arid land without irrigation or clear ownership rights. Some are still fighting for justice after half a century.

The Narmada Valley Development Project, which includes large structures like the Sardar Sarovar Dam and other dams on the Narmada river, led to massive displacement. Over two lakh rural and tribal people lost their homes and lands to reservoir submergence without fair compensation. The Narmada project also caused severe environmental damage, like submergence of dense forests, destruction of local wildlife habitats and obstructed the migration paths for fish. Official statements usually assert that rehabilitation has been completed, but independent investigations document missing land allotments, fake registries, uncultivable plots on a large scale and thousands of excluded families. Even today, many displaced families continue to seek their just dues and compensation. This is the history of “development” and discrimination in India.

Such discrimination results in livelihood collapse. The forest gatherer loses access to forest produce. The fisher loses the river. Tenant farmers, artisans, cattle grazers, boatmen and agricultural labourers disappear from official compensation records because they do not exist in government records. This is why people in the Ken-Betwa region are anxious. They know of the government’s track record on rehabilitation.

Equally worrying is the ecological blindness underlying the river-linking approach itself. Experts have warned repeatedly that the hydro-dynamics of Indian river systems are still inadequately understood. Climate change has already altered rainfall behaviour across India. Rivers that appear “surplus” today may not remain so tomorrow. Yet massive irreversible interventions are being pursued with astonishing confidence.

Bundelkhand’s water crisis is real. But it cannot be solved through ecologically disruptive mega-projects. Destroying the environment and upsetting the natural balance can never provide sustainable solutions, which is what we should be seeking, not shortcuts that have failed time and again. Rivers are not pipelines. Their flow patterns, seasonal rhythms, sediment loads, groundwater recharge functions and biodiversity relationships are deeply interconnected.

Dry regions in India built sustainable systems to ensure water access using decentralised water systems — tanks, ponds, watershed structures, forest protection and groundwater recharge practices adapted to local ecology. Instead of strengthening such systems and improving them, we choose to chase gigantic engineering solutions because they appear politically dramatic. The tragedy is that in such projects, the benefits and burdens are rarely borne by the same people. Water and electricity flow somewhere else, to urban centres and commercial agriculture. But the people who surrender their forests, villages and ancestral lands are often left with nothing more than broken promises.

This appeared in The Asian Age: https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/suman-sahai-ken-betwa-link-development-or-more-mindless-discrimination-1981618

📍Destroying Uttarakhand

Many years ago when I went to school in Nainital, it was a place of thrilling natural beauty. Uttarakhand then a part of Uttar Pradesh, (UP) was lush and green wherever you looked. Every place seemed like a picnic spot.

In 2000, the new state of Uttarakhand was created, hiving off the hilly areas of UP and some parts of the terai. Then “development” began in right ernest , turning this haven into a concrete jungle. A study conducted by the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) using satellite imagery, climate data, and GIS analysis shows that snow cover decreased by over 1640 sq km from 1992 to 2022. In the same period concrete construction increased 13 times from 40.66 sq km in 1992 to 526.35 sq km in 2022.

Uttarakhand is being slowly buried under concrete. Gone is the haven with lush green forests full of wonderful plants, birds and animals. In its place is emerging an ugly built up blot on the Himalayas. Not only is the state turning ugly, it is also turning dangerous. Roads are being cut into hillsides without any planning, opening them up to landslides which have increased several fold. Forests are being slaughtered, driving wild life away and altering the ecosystem for the worse. Forests regulated water flow, when they are cut flooding increases. 

The perverse tragedy is that the development that is needed, is not reaching the villages where good schools, health care, basic services and livelihood opportunities are desperately required. All the development is devoted to urban areas converting them into monstrous concrete jungles. You just have to visit the famed hill stations of yesterday - Nainital, Dehradun and Mussoorie to see what hideous urban sprawls they have become. 

This kind of “development” that our so called ‘vikas’ oriented government boasts about, is actually raising vulnerability, for people in the mountains, as well as for people living downstream. The Himalayas are a living, fragile ecosystem with tenuous limits. It is extremely foolish and highly dangerous to think you can continue treating mountains like construction sites. Nature will have the final say and the consequences will be extremely unpleasant, as we have already begun to see with increasing incidences of manmade calamities.

 📍Svalbard: The Gene Bank near the North Pole

One of the most precious structures located in the Arctic is the Svalbard Gene Bank built into a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, just outside the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago of Norway. This international Gene Bank is located roughly 120 meters deep inside the frozen permafrost, at a latitude of 78 degrees North, well inside the Arctic Circle, close to the North Pole.

The Gene Bank in Svalbard is often referred to as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Doomsday Vault. This name embodies the intent of the Gene/ Seed collection in Svalbard, that if the Earth were to suffer catastrophic damage, if doomsday, so to speak, were to arrive, then seeds of the crops grown across the world would be found stored safely here. These seeds could be used to replant the ravaged Earth and help the remnants of the surviving humanity to stay alive and re-people the Earth again.

Svalbard is to be seen as a secure backup facility for seeds. It is like a safe deposit box where the seeds remain the property of the depositors. The bank holds over 1.4 million samples from countries across the globe. The vault physically holds backup seed samples from over 220 countries /territories which means practically the whole world. It preserves the genetic diversity of crop plants, especially food crops against climate change, wars, disasters, and other catastrophes that the human race could dream up.

India is among the leading contributors to the Svalbard Bank. The largest number of samples have come from the National Gene Banks of India, the United States, Germany, and Canada. These countries maintain some of the biggest volumes of backup crates inside the vault. 

I visited the Svalbard Seed Vault in 2009 at the invitation of the Norwegian Government. The invitation came because of Gene Campaign’s work on conserving crop genetic diversity and setting up community managed Zero Energy Gene–Seed Banks in villages in Jharkhand. Different kind of banks to the Arctic vault but same goals.

The Indian monsoon, the lifeblood of India’s very survival, has been wobbling for some years now. Climate change is responsible for the turbulence in the monsoon system which has existed, according to some estimates, for 25 million years. This system has been the bedrock of our agriculture, water security and livelihoods for millennia. When climate change begins to disrupt its timing and intensity, it is not simply a weather anomaly; it is a signal that is putting us on alert that the happy, secure systems that were built around the monsoon are becoming unreliable, that the earlier rhythm is disrupted and we must prepare urgently to deal with it.

Preparations to adapt to the new monsoon should have begun earlier. Any further delay in recognising its growing unpredictability will have very serious implications. Agriculture, water security and rural livelihoods are already under stress. We need urgently to establish climate resilient agriculture systems in different agro-climatic zones. We know what is required: greater genetic diversity in the field, both within crops and across the number and range of crops being planted; better soil management, water conservation and sustainable use etc.

Our preparedness to cope must improve quickly. Although the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has gotten much better at forecasting the monsoon’s vagaries and extreme weather events, these are of little use when authorities do not act on the warning and response remains tardy. Our infrastructure remains inadequate to deal with the changing conditions like the large volumes of water after a cloudburst. Our drainage and flood management systems belong to another era when the monsoon was the benign, predictable system we were familiar with. All that has changed. It’s high time we acted.

👉 A recent article by Murali Krishnan makes an interesting read. https://www.dw.com/en/disrupted-monsoons-force-india-to-face-climate-threat/a-78324753

We are getting so used to things like pollution and the turbulent changes in the climate, that we have begun to perceive these as normal. That is scary since it dents our will to act against harmful changes. 

As for the climate, each generation is inheriting a warmer, more degraded environment, so yesterday’s extremes are quietly becoming today’s normal. This “shifting baseline” is one of the more dangerous dimensions of climate change because it is invoking a reaction from the brain. When ecological loss becomes normalised, our ability to recognise the crisis, and demand action, diminishes with it.

I recently came across this insightful article from McGill University that examines why climate change is failing to generate the urgency it demands. The article posits that our brains are poorly equipped to process a threat that is gradual, dispersed and not immediately visible. Our brains are conditioned to focus on an immediate threat not so much on a situation that is worsening gradually and that does not appear immediately threatening. Each generation is only experiencing a somewhat worse, somewhat more damaging degradation of the environment or the biosphere, no generation actually sees the complete degradation or the total loss. So it does not jump up to intervene, and the damage continues.

Link to the article https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment/how-do-you-squeeze-climate-change-inside-human-brain

❗The Silent Pest Invasions Driven by Climate Change

One of the effects of global warming has been an increase in pest populations and the appearance of new pests and diseases in agriculture. This is because rising temperature can prompt insects to mature faster, reproduce earlier and cause population explosions. This makes a minor pest a major one. 

 

Pest populations also migrate to new areas where the earlier cooler conditions were not hospitable. The altered weather conditions become favourable to the pests and pathogens that were not adjusted to the earlier habitats. For example, pests that were historically found in the warmer tropical and subtropical regions are now moving north to cooler temperate areas because these have become more inviting thanks to a warming world.

 

The biting cold of our North Indian winters has acted to some extent as a natural regulator, killing off pests and limiting the size of the population and hence the scale of infestations. But now, as temperatures rise and winters become milder, more pests can survive the winter, extend their breeding seasons and expand into regions where colder temperatures previously restricted them. Warming climates are inviting new, often invasive pest species to migrate into agricultural zones where they were previously unknown. 

 

What is urgently needed is an early warning system that can sound the alert as soon as  anew pest is detected in a region. This will enable agencies to introduce measures to tackle the nascent population before it becomes a full blown infestation. The work of breeding new pest resistant varieties should start much earlier though, in anticipation of possible attacks from new pests.  FAO for instance, tracks the movement of the two significant fungal diseases Wheat Rust and Wheat Bunt and warns countries if they are found approaching their areas so that prophylactic measures can be put in place,

 

The scale of the threat from new pests is already alarming. According to the FAO, up to 40% of global crop production is lost to plant pests and diseases every year, costing the global economy more than US$220 billion annually. And the danger could grow significantly as the planet warms. The International Plant Protection Convention estimates that losses in major crops such as wheat, rice and maize due to insect pests could increase by 10–25% for every additional degree of global warming. Even a single unusually warm winter, an FAO-IPPC scientific review warns, can help an invasive pest establish itself in a new region.

 

An ICAR review states that 20–30% of India’s potential crop production is destroyed by insect pests, diseases, weeds and rodents. Another ICAR publication estimates that pests and pathogens alone account for 15–20% yield losses in major field and horticultural crops, while noting that the profile of key pests and pathogens is changing rapidly due to factors including climate change.

 

India has already seen how quickly a new pest can invade its agricultural landscape. Fall Armyworm, a pest native to the Americas, was first officially reported in India in 2018. By June 2019, it had spread to 20 states and affected more than 376,000 hectares.

👉 Your Food is Your Medicine!

Traditional agricultural practices produced healthier crops and more nutritious food. Intensive agriculture and excessive use of agrochemicals on the other hand harms soil microbial life, the bacteria, viruses, bugs and worms that keep the soil healthy and produce good crops. When soil health goes for a toss, conditions become adverse for the crop, producing a sub optimal harvest and poor quality food. 

Here is another aspect. Crops grown with irrigation on tap, full loads of chemical fertilisers and pesticide use do not experience the healthy stress that comes with exposure to periods of sub optimal water availability or occasional exposures to some disease or pest attack. Such stress forces the plant to produce chemical compounds in an effort to survive. These defense compounds help the plant to fight off pathogens, herbivores, and damage from ultraviolet rays but they are also beneficials to humans.

Flavonoids like Anthocyanins are produced under drought or cold stress. These compounds give fruits and vegetables vibrant colors like the purple of brinjals, jamun and plums and the reds of pomegranates, raspberries and strawberries. Anthocyanins act as powerful antioxidants in the human body, reducing inflammation and cellular damage and mopping up free radicals that can cause cancer. Another compound called Resveratrol is found in red grapes and berries, especially when they are exposed to, cold, wet, or fungal stress. Resveratrol is known for its cardiovascular benefits and anti-aging properties. 

Plants also synthesize another interesting group of compounds called Neurotransmitters. They synthesize these molecules to manage stress and regulate metabolic responses. In the human body they act as chemical messengers performing the crucial function of transmitting signals between different parts of the brain and between the brain and different organs like the eyes or the liver or gut. There is some evidence that compounds found in soybean could prevent cancer. Other research is exploring the possible beneficial effects of phytochemicals found in foods like rice, beans and sugarcane. 

In light of all this, scientists are trying to see whether it's possible to alter diet in ways to include certain foods which have therapeutic properties or other direct health benefits. 

This is interesting since it gives a modern context to what Ayurveda stated hundreds of years ago, that food is the supreme medicine and along with good sleep and lifestyle discipline, one of the three pillars of life. Ayurvedic texts state quite clearly that with a wholesome diet, there is no need for medicine, and with an unwholesome diet, even medicine is of no use!